Deleuze, The Dark Precursor

Dialectic, Structure, Being

Eleanor Kaufman

Publication Year: 2012

Gilles Deleuze is considered one of the most important French philosophers of the twentieth century. Eleanor Kaufman situates Deleuze in relation to others of his generation, such as Jean-Paul Sartre,
Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and she engages the provocative readings of Deleuze by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.
Deleuze, The Dark Precursor is organized around three themes that critically overlap: dialectic, structure, and being. Kaufman argues that Deleuze's work is deeply concerned with these concepts, even when he advocates for the seemingly opposite notions of univocity, nonsense, and becoming. By drawing on scholastic thought and reading somewhat against the grain, Kaufman suggests that these often-maligned themes allow for a nuanced, even positive reflection on seemingly negative states of being, such as extreme inertia. This attention to the negative or minor category has implications that extend beyond philosophy and into feminist theory, film, American studies, anthropology, and architecture.

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Deleuze’s Scholasticism

Against the tendency to privilege the joint works of Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari and questions of becoming and flux, nomadism,
deterritorialization, lines of flight, and movements of all sorts so often
associated with the name Deleuze, I offer this small study. At its most...

PART ONE: DIALECTIC

The four chapters in part 1 consider Deleuze as an unlikely thinker
of the dialectic. They follow from a minor strain of Deleuze scholarship
that looks beyond Deleuze’s avowed renunciation of the
dialectic and instead probes another, perhaps less Hegelian mode of dialectic
that persists in Deleuze. In this fashion, I am attempting to think...

1 Solid Dialectic in Sartre and Deleuze

Not only is there a common persistence of the dialectic in the
philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Gilles Deleuze, but linked to this
there is a persistence of the solid object that cuts to the very heart of a
theory of temporality. Lurking on the horizon of smooth space is the...

2 Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Mind

One of deleuze’s philosophical achievements is that he renders
the classic mind-body dualism both more complex and ultimately
beside the point. He does this by showing over and again how the body
and the mind are inseparably linked to each other, how they are part of the
same assemblage that is to be regarded in terms of what it can do rather...

3 Klossowski and Orthodoxy

In a fashion not unlike what we have seen with the mind-body
disjunction, Klossowski’s oeuvre is also a preeminent illustration of
what divides univocity and equivocity, and in this fashion serves as one of
the twentieth century’s most instructive models for thinking the complexity...

4 Cinema and the Tableau Vivant

The encounter between Deleuze and Klossowski is nowhere better
staged than on the terrain of immobility, which is taken up as a
central motif in part 3. Immobility serves as a concept for extending Deleuze’s
work on cinema to a domain that has been evoked but not explicitly...

PART TWO: STRUCTURE

This section continues the work of arguing for Deleuze’s hidden
dialectic, but this time in conjunction with a new grouping of
thinkers and a new focus on the question of ‘‘structure,’’ another
term rarely associated with Deleuze but surprisingly important in his early
writings. Following from the brief discussion in the introduction, it begins...

5 Betraying Well ( Žižek and Badiou)

As with many prominent thinkers, there is a striking imperative
that circulates among those who read Deleuze: a drive to fidelity, or
more nearly to not betray the master’s thought, the trap that so many who
write in his wake purportedly fall into. The world of Deleuze criticism is...

6 Lévi-Strauss and the Joy of Abstraction

Deleuze insists at different points that the most radical possibility
for thought (if not politics) is to become more, not less, abstract. It
is this potential for becoming more abstract that I locate as the hinge point
between what might be narrated as Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism...

7 Extreme Formality and the World without Others

There are numerous ways in which Deleuze’s thought might be
aligned with a generally recognizable form of ethics: from his beautiful
Nietzschean meditations in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy on the ethics
of good and bad forces as opposed to the morality of Good and Evil, to...

PART THREE: BEING

Part 3 focuses on a range of primarily literary texts that develop the
connections between mobility and immobility and between becoming
and being. Deleuze was an avid and laudatory reader and critic
of American literature, and he seems particularly drawn to American...

8 French Thought and the Space of American Literature

It is something of a truism that America is integrally connected to the
concept of vast unbounded space and, more precisely, to unbounded
movement through that space. In other words, freedom of movement
across virtually uncharted territory is taken as a cornerstone of a specifically...

9 Bartleby, the Immobile

These questions of immobility and of transatlantic fascination
are supremely condensed in the figure of Melville’s Bartleby. As discussed
in the preceding chapter, there is a powerful disjunction between a
rampant tendency to generalize about America and a refusal to view the...

10 In the Middle of Things

Abreathtaking, terrifying verticality emanates from the skyscrapers
in New York City. This verticality reflects a certain vision of
space, one that is monumental, urban, large scale. Here I wish to speak of
another kind of space, one that is not urban—or not necessarily so—one...

11 Midnight, or the Inertia of Being

There is hardly a more consistent thinker than Maurice Blanchot.
His work is disarming in its weave of fiction and philosophy, in its
timeless anonymity, its undoing of the dialectic, and the affirmation of
worklessness and the community of those who have nothing in common....

12 Living Virtually in a Cluttered House

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard proposes a new field of
investigation or perception, one that would be attuned, like psychoanalysis,
to inner psychological states, yet also attuned to the way architecture
and space affect those states. He terms such a field ‘‘topoanalysis’’...

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